2016_BIO_Program_x1a with bleeds

CORE
Choosing a Subject
10:45–11:45AM LOCATION: SHENANDOAH
How do experienced biographers select their next subject?
Discover sources of inspiration, lessons learned
from false starts, and strategies for home runs.
Moderator
James Atlasis the author of Delmore Schwartz: The Life of
an American Poet, which was nominated for a National Book
Award, and Bellow: A Biography. He was the founding editor
of the Penguin Lives and of three other series of brief biographies:
Great Discoveries, Eminent Lives, and Icons. He
was for many years an editor at the New York Times, and his
work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New
York Review of Books, and many other publications. He is the
author of a forthcoming memoir entitled The Shadow in the
Garden: A Biographer’s Tale.
Panelists
Blake Baileyis the author of biographies of John Cheever,
Richard Yates, and Charles Jackson, and he is working on
the authorized biography of Philip Roth. He is the recipient
of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Award in Literature
from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, winner
of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Francis
Parkman Prize, and a finalist for the Pulitzer and James Tait
Black Memorial Prizes. His last book, The Splendid Things
We Planned, was a finalist for the National Book Critics
Circle Award.
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D.T. (Dan) Maxis a graduate of Harvard University and a
staff writer at the New Yorker. His book Every Love Story Is a
Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, published in 2012,
was a New York Times bestseller. He is also the author of The
Family That Couldn’t Sleep: A Medical Mystery. He lives in New
Jersey with his wife, their two young children, and a rescued
beagle who came to them named Max.
Stacy Schiffis the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov),
winner of the Pulitzer Prize; as well as of Saint-Exupéry, a
Pulitzer Prize finalist; A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France,
and the Birth of America, awarded the George Washington
Book Prize; and Cleopatra: A Life, a No. 1 bestseller. Schiff has
received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and
the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as an
Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy
of Arts and Letters. In 2011 she was named a Library Lion
of the New York Public Library. Her most recent book is The
Witches: Salem, 1692.
CRAFT
Narrative Strategies
10:45–11:45AM LOCATION: SALONS 6–7–8
Along with character development, narrative structure
is at the heart of the biographical enterprise. An
in-depth discussion of chronology (“abandon it at your
peril”), context-building, the narrative arc, and the
construction of a compelling narrative work.
Moderator
Debby Applegate’s first book, The Most Famous Man in
America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (Doubleday),
won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Her second
book, Madam: The Notorious Life and Times of Polly Adler, is
forthcoming from Doubleday. She was a Sterling Fellow
in American Studies at Yale, where she earned her Ph.D.,
and is a graduate of Amherst College. She lives in New
Haven, Connecticut, with her husband, the business writer
Bruce Tulgan.
Panelists
Kirk Elliswon two Emmys, a WGA Award, a Peabody, and
the Humanitas Prize for his work as writer and co-executive
producer on the HBO miniseries John Adams. Programs on
which he has served as writer and producer have garnered
more than 50 Emmy nominations. Ellis is currently writing
the Harriet Tubman story, Bound for the Promised Land,
for Viola Davis and HBO, as well as Explorers, a limited series
recounting the Nile quest of Sir Richard Burton and John
Hanning Speke.
Beth Macyis the author of the Lukas Prize-winning Factory
Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed
Local—and Helped Save an American Town. A longtime reporter
who specializes in outsiders and underdogs, Macy has won
more than a dozen national journalism awards, including a
Nieman Fellowship. In October, Little, Brown will publish
Macy’s Truevine: A Strange and Troubling Tale of Two Brothers in
Jim Crow America. It traces the kidnapping of two African-
American brothers who were sold to the circus around the
Biographers International Organization
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